Face to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the
impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn’t want
to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the
matter with her?”
Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”
“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”
“A young man who was just with her--and whom she appears to have
invited.”
“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.
“Off there among the pictures--which he seems partly to have come for.”
“Oh!”--it made his lordship easier. “Then he’s all right--on such a
day.”
His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn’t Lady Grace told
you?”
“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly
preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you
know the freedom I allow her.”
His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by
it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John’s face a light
of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.
Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained--as to show himself
far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score--at
this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also--to _know_ the
time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your
own--of whom I’ve but just heard?”
“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken
care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the
least of Lord John’s difficulties. “I mustn’t appear to Bender to have
failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that,
seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very
pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn’t been perhaps,” he continued,
“quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if
I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without
abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect--for our case--that you’ll be
so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her
yourself.”
“Without loss, you mean, of--a--my daughter’s time?” Lord Theign,
confessedly and amiably interested, had accepted these intimations--yet
with the very blandness that was not accessible to hustling and was
never forgetful of its standing privilege of criticism. He had come in
from his public duty, a few minutes before, somewhat flushed and blown;
but that had presently dropped--to the effect, we should have guessed,
of his appearing to Lord John at least as cool as the occasion required.
His appearance, we ourselves certainly should have felt, was in all
respects charming--with the great note of it the beautiful restless,
almost suspicious, challenge to you, on the part of deep and mixed
things in him, his pride and his shyness, his conscience, his taste and
his temper, to deny that he was admirably simple. Obviously, at this
rate, he had a passion for simplicity--simplicity, above all, of
relation with you, and would show you, with the last subtlety of
displeasure, his impatience of your attempting anything more with
himself. With such an ideal of decent ease he would, confound you,
“sink” a hundred other attributes--or the recognition at least and the
formulation of them--that you might abjectly have taken for granted in
him: just to show you that in a beastly vulgar age you had, and small
wonder, a beastly vulgar imagination. He sank thus, surely, in defiance
of insistent vulgarity, half his consciousness of his advantages,
flattering himself that mere facility and amiability, a true effective,
a positively ideal suppression of reference in any one to anything that
might complicate, alone floated above. This would be quite his religion,
you might infer--to cause his hands to ignore in whatever contact any
opportunity, however convenient, for an unfair pull. Which habit it was
that must have produced in him a sort of ripe and radiant fairness; if
it be allowed us, that is, to figure in so shining an air a nobleman of
fifty-three, of an undecided rather than a certified frame or outline,
of a head thinly though neatly covered and not measureably massive, of
an almost trivial freshness, of a face marked but by a fine inwrought
line or two and lighted by a merely charming expression. You might
somehow have traced back the whole character so presented to an ideal
privately invoked--that of his establishing in the formal garden of his
suffered greatness such easy seats and short perspectives, such winding
paths and natural-looking waters, as would mercifully break up the
scale. You would perhaps indeed have reflected at the same time that the
thought of so much mercy was almost more than anything else the thought
of a great option and a great margin--in fine of fifty alternatives.
Which remarks of ours, however, leave his lordship with his last
immediate question on his hands.
“Well, yes--_that_, of course, in all propriety,” his companion has
meanwhile replied to it. “But I was thinking a little, you understand,
of the importance of our own time.”
Divinably Lord Theign put himself out less, as we may say, for
the comparatively matter-of-course haunters of his garden than for
interlopers even but slightly accredited. He seemed thus not at all to
strain to “understand” in this particular connection--it would be his
familiarly amusing friend Lord John, clearly, who must do most of the
work for him. “‘Our own’ in the sense of yours and mine?”
“Of yours and mine and Lady Imber’s, yes--and a good bit, last not
least, in that of my watching and waiting mother’s.” This struck no
prompt spark of apprehension from his listener, so that Lord John went
on: “The last thing she did this morning was to remind me, with her fine
old frankness, that she would like to learn without more delay where, on
the whole question, she _is_, don’t you know? What she put to me”--the
younger man felt his ground a little, but proceeded further--“what she
put to me, with her rather grand way of looking _all_ questions straight
in the face, you see, was: Do we or don’t we, decidedly, take up
practically her very handsome offer--‘very handsome’ being, I mean,
what _she_ calls it; though it strikes even me too, you know, as rather
decent.”
Lord Theign at this point resigned himself to know. “Kitty has of course
rubbed into me how decent she herself finds it. She hurls herself again
on me--successfully!--for everything, and it suits her down to the
ground. She pays her beastly debt--that is, I mean to say,” and he took
himself up, though it was scarce more than perfunctory, “discharges
her obligations--by her sister’s fair hand; not to mention a few other
trifles for which I naturally provide.”
Lord John, a little unexpectedly to himself on the defensive, was yet
but briefly at a loss. “Of course we take into account, don’t we? not
only the fact of my mother’s desire (intended, I assure you, to be most
flattering) that Lady Grace shall enter our family with all honours, but
her expressed readiness to facilitate the thing by an understanding over
and above----”
“Over and above Kitty’s release from her damnable payment?”--Lord Theign
reached out to what his guest had left rather in the air. “Of course
we take _everything_ into account--or I shouldn’t, my dear fellow, be
discussing with you at all a business one or two of whose aspects so
little appeal to me: especially as there’s nothing, you easily conceive,
that a daughter of mine can come in for by entering even your family,
or any other (as a family) that she wouldn’t be quite as sure of by just
staying in her own. The Duchess’s idea, at any rate, if I’ve followed
you, is that if Grace does accept you she settles on you twelve
thousand; with the condition--”
Lord John was already all there. “Definitely, yes, of your settling the
equivalent on Lady Grace.”
“And what do you call the equivalent of twelve thousand?”
“Why, tacked on to a value so great and so charming as Lady Grace
herself, I dare say such a sum as nine or ten would serve.”
“And where the mischief, if you please, at this highly inconvenient
time, am I to pick up nine or ten thousand?”
Lord John declined, with a smiling, a fairly irritating eye for his
friend’s general resources, to consider that question seriously. “Surely
you can have no difficulty whatever--!”
“Why not?--when you can see for yourself that I’ve had this year to
let poor dear old Hill Street! Do you call it the moment for me to have
_liked_ to see myself all but cajoled into planking down even such a
matter as the very much lower figure of Kitty’s horrid incubus?”
“Ah, but the inducement and the _quid pro quo_,” Lord John brightly
indicated, “are here much greater! In the case you speak of you will
only have removed the incubus--which, I grant you, she must and you must
feel as horrid. In this other you pacify Lady Imber _and_ marry Lady
Grace: marry her to a man who has set his heart on her and of whom she
has just expressed--to himself--a very kind and very high opinion.”
“She has expressed a very high opinion of you?”--Lord Theign scarce
glowed with credulity.
But the younger man held his ground. “She has told me she thoroughly
likes me and that--though a fellow feels an ass repeating such
things--she thinks me perfectly charming.”
“A tremendous creature, eh, all round? Then,” said Lord Theign, “what
does she want more?”
“She very possibly wants nothing--but I’m to that beastly degree,
you see,” his visitor patiently explained, “in the cleft stick of my
fearfully positive mother’s wants. Those are her ‘terms,’ and I don’t
mind saying that they’re most disagreeable to me--I quite hate ‘em:
there! Only I think it makes a jolly difference that I wouldn’t
touch ‘em with a long pole if my personal feeling--in respect to Lady
Grace--wasn’t so immensely enlisted.”
“I assure you I’d chuck ‘em out of window, my boy, if I didn’t believe
you’d be really good to her,” Lord Theign returned with the properest
spirit.
It only encouraged his companion. “You _will_ just tell her then, now
and here, how good you honestly believe I shall be?”
This appeal required a moment--a longer look at him. “You truly hold
that that friendly guarantee, backed by my parental weight, will do your
job?”
“That’s the conviction I entertain.”
Lord Theign thought again. “Well, even if your conviction’s just, that
still doesn’t tell me into which of my very empty pockets it will be of
the least use for me to fumble.”
“Oh,” Lord John laughed, “when a man has such a tremendous assortment
of breeches--!” He pulled up, however, as, in his motion, his eye caught
the great vista of the open rooms. “If it’s a question of pockets--and
what’s _in_ ‘em--here precisely is my man!” This personage had come back
from his tour of observation and was now, on the threshold of the hall,
exhibited to Lord Theign as well. Lord John’s welcome was warm. “I’ve
had awfully to fail you, Mr. Bender, but I was on the point of joining
you. Let me, however, still better, introduce you to our host.”